Rot from the Top

Dysfunction is a recurring theme in the NFL. You would think that with as much money is at stake that teams would tend towards some measure of efficiency, but year in and year out we run into stories that sit firmly in the middle of the Venn Diagram between “terrible” and “bizzare”. Every year at the beginning we think we have seen it all, and each year we are proven wrong again.

Halfway through 2019, this season has been no exception either. Washington has only a single win and has already fired their head coach, and their best player is refusing to play for them because he doesn’t trust the medical staff. The Jets have a historically putrid offense only a few months after hiring a supposed offensive guru, who then forced out the GM that had hired him. They just cut one of their big offseason acquisitions after a very public feud that resulted in him going outside the team to get a surgery they didn’t approve. And in Cleveland a team that many people picked as one of the top contenders in the AFC is now 2-5, with a rookie head coach who seems hopelessly lost and a second year quarterback openly feuding with the media.

The details of these stories seem shocking, but parts of the previous paragraph are not surprising at all, namely the teams I listed. Because the Jets, the Redskins, and the Browns would be right at the top of the list of teams you expect this kind of nonsense from. The same stories have been happening to these teams for decades, through multiple coaching staffs and front office administrations. And at this point the only reasonable place to direct the blame is the ownership.

It still seems a little shocking how much bad ownership can sink a franchise. In theory an owner is only around to sign the checks, delegating day to day operations to people who should know what they’re doing. But of course, the owner is the one who picks these people, and the sort of wealth that is required to own an NFL team is also the sort that convinces a person they know what’s best in every situation.

It isn’t surprising that these three teams have floundered so far this year. But the biggest shock of the season so far is the team that I likely would have listed as fourth in the group coming into the season, one of the last two remaining undefeated teams.

The San Francisco 49ers have flown under the radar as one of the most dysfunctional franchises in the league for quite some time now. Part of this is history, with five championships coming under a previous owner. Part of this is the brief run of success they had under Jim Harbaugh earlier this decade. But if you remove the four years under Harbaugh’s control, this team has averaged just over five wins a year since 2003, and failed to make the playoffs any of those twelve seasons. The ownership was in fact a major role in forcing Harbaugh out, ending the brief flare of success and sending them to four straight top ten draft selections.

And yet, so far this year they have been one of the best teams in the league. They seem to have turned things around in a way they have never been able to in the past, in a way that I frankly thought they were incapable of. And it’s provided a sort of blueprint for the other franchises to follow, on the off chance they are smart enough to recognize the source of their own failings.

Have a Plan

This part seems easy. And I’m sure if you asked any of these owners, they would tell you that they’ve always had a plan. But their actions certainly don’t back this up. Not this year, when the Jets fired head coach Todd Bowles but kept around GM Mike MacCagnan, at least until new coach Adam Gase convinced the ownership to force him out. So instead of starting from scratch, they inserted a new head coach into a power structure with a lame duck GM, who they allowed to dedicate massive resources to the offseason without the consent of the new head coach.

The key to a plan is a timeline, and when you make a change at one of the two key positions in a franchise but not the other, you leave key decision makers with very different timelines. MacCagnan needed to spend heavily in free agency, because he knew his job was in jeopardy if the Jets didn’t make a major step forward. Where Gase might have been willing to build more slowly around a young core, he suddenly found himself having to integrate high priced veterans like Le’Veon Bell and CJ Mosley. And of course, now that MacCagnan is gone, there have been a lot of rumors that Gase wants to move on from these players, if only that was an option.

The 49ers took a different tactic the last time they had to rebuild the top of their franchise. They fired both GM Trent Baalke and head coach Chip Kelly after the 2016 season, giving them the opportunity to pick replacements on the same timeline and with the same plan. And not only did they get two fresh faces together in Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch, they chose two with the same philosophy and strategy on how they want to build the team.

This coordination seems self-evident, but it certainly hasn’t been the case with the other teams. Following the 2015 season the Browns had the opportunity to fill both roles, and they went in very different directions with each of them. For GM they promoted an executive from within the franchise, Sashi Brown who had more of a background in analytics than player evaluation. And at head coach they chose Hue Jackson, an old fashioned football-first coach. It was no shock when the two of them clashed over how to run the team, and it ended with Brown being ousted midway through his second season. Jackson lasted less than a year longer before being cast aside, but remnants of their mismatched plans remain scattered across the organization.

This sort of disorganization has been evident in Washington as well. They used their first round selection on Dwayne Haskins, a quarterback with the ability to absorb the offense and come in to start right away. That was probably the best course for the long term future of the team, but with a returning head coach the long term future wasn’t the only goal of the franchise. Jay Gruden had no interest in staking his future on a rookie quarterback, and he gave Haskins no practice reps with the first team offense. And even after they dismissed him, Haskins remains behind schedule, unprepared even as he goes into his first career start this weekend.

Stick to the Plan

Again, this seems obvious, but that’s the level we’re operating at with these teams. The attentions spans with these owners are bafflingly short, and I’m not sure if all of these teams would have given the same leeway that Shanahan and Lynch have received. The two of them signed six year deals when they joined the 49ers, and the ownership has committed to keeping them around long term even as the first couple years have been rocky.

Again, two years doesn’t seem like that much of a grace period. But the 49ers won only four games last year. Over the past ten years, teams that have won four or fewer games have fired their coach half the time. If we exclude coaches in their first season with the team, that rises to two-thirds of coaches. In fact, both Washington and Cleveland have fired a coach after a disappointing second season in that time.

Despite San Francisco’s commitment, there were some voices calling for changes to be made this offseason. Things certainly didn’t seem great coming into the year for either the coach or the GM. Lynch’s first two drafts had produced some very good mid-round finds, but his first selection—Solomon Thomas—has more or less already been written off as a bust. This team didn’t look great coming into the year, and it wouldn’t have been shocking if they had decided to reset after last year’s failures.

They stuck with Shanahan, and they stuck with Jimmy Garoppolo too, even after a season lost due to injury. His contract situation made it an easy choice, though they easily could have spent a high draft selection on a quarterback with the plan to let Garoppolo go after this year (it certainly wouldn’t have been any more extreme than Arizona using back to back first round selections on a quarterback).

Adaptability is a useful trait in the NFL, but changing course mid-stream can often cause more problems than it solves. That’s how you end up with Haskins getting limited practice experience under one head coach during the preseason, then promoted to starter with another head coach midway through the year. That’s how you get a Jets team pouring money onto Le’Veon Bell in March, followed by a coach who wants to trade him by October.

People often view moves like these as sunk costs, which should be ignored. But it isn’t just the cost of someone like Bell or Garoppolo. It’s the cost of finding a replacement, which would be incurred if the team decided to cast them aside before anything was certain. The 49ers could have selected Haskins or Daniel Jones with their top selection in this year’s draft, and committed to a new future for the franchise. And in doing so they would have missed out on Nick Bosa, already a star powering their defense.

The Garoppolo move was a gamble when they added him in 2017. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off in 2018, and they had a choice on whether or not to make it again headed into 2019. It has paid off for them to stick with that so far, choosing stability at the most important position rather than trying to make it up as they go.

Don’t Strip Your Roster to Nothing

It has become a trend across sports over the past decade to fully embrace bottoming out as a franchise. It worked to get the Astros and Cubs titles in the MLB, and it has worked to build Philadelphia into a contender in the NBA. And though the three teams I’ve mentioned already aren’t following that path this year (though the Browns and the Jets certainly have in the past), we are seeing the most aggressive tanking strategy in recent NFL history by the Dolphins, a team that would be among the next tier to be discussed in terms of consistently mismanaged franchises.

The problem with this is, there are a lot of players on an NFL roster. 53 to be exact, which means there are a huge number of positions you need to fill once you turn your franchise around and start trying to be competitive again. This is the lesson Cleveland is learning the hard way this season. They’ve done a remarkable job adding top of the franchise talent over the past few years, adding stars through the draft and trades like Myles Garrett, Denzel Ward, and Odell Beckham. And yet despite this star power they are 2-5, and maybe the most disappointing team in the NFL this year.

The problem with the Browns is that they are still the Browns, both in the metaphorical cosmic sense, and in the fact that a decent chunk of this roster was part of the team that went 0-16 two years ago. They have turned over a lot in that time, but there is only so much a team can accomplish in two years, especially when they are sending off multiple draft picks for players like Beckham and Jarvis Landry.

I still think the Browns have a bright future, but it will probably take them longer than expected to get where they’re going. Contrast that with San Francisco, a team that at least maintained some semblance of competitiveness during their down years.

Look across their roster now, and you see a depth of veteran players who form the backbone of the team supporting their new stars. Joe Staley has been a centerpiece since before the Harbaugh years. Marquise Goodwin and Kyle Juszczyk were added as free agent signings in Lynch’s first offseason and remain useful role players on the team. And though DeForest Buckner is quieter with the bigger names brought in on the outside of the defensive line, he remains a star in the interior, the sort of player a tanking team would have cast aside for a draft pick that might be able to replicate his value two or three years down the road.

This is the fear I have with Miami’s plan. Because that roster has been stripped to the bones, and outside of Xavien Howard (now on IR) I’m not sure there’s anyone there who I feel confident saying is going to be a part of this team when their young core finally arrives. They are building a team with their eyes two or three years down the line, but two or three years from now the Dolphins are going to be a team of players in their early twenties, promising but not nearly ready to compete.

Get Lucky

I’ll make this brief, but I do have to acknowledge it. Because as much as we can praise the 49ers for their smart decision-making, they’ve had a string of luck that has eluded the other bottom dwelling teams for years.

As I mentioned above they took a gamble on Garoppolo, and though he’s far from a star, I think it’s fair to say that gamble has paid off. The ability to find talent in later rounds is always a key for sustained success, but even Lynch probably wouldn’t take all the credit for finding George Kittle, the best tight end in the league, available in the third round. Similarly they had the good fortune of a player of Bosa’s game changing ability being available in the draft last year, and of Arizona falling in love with Kyler Murray rather than taking him off the board.

There are a lot of ways this could have gone wrong. But most crucially, there are a lot of ways this didn’t go wrong. Jed York seems to have finally stabilized things in San Francisco, recognizing the value of a cohesive plan and of stepping back to let that plan unfold. Only time will tell if the dysfunction that has haunted them for nearly two decades will return to sink what looks to be a promising young team, but for now they look to have pulled off a minor miracle, turning around one of the bottom feeding franchises of the NFL.